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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25885957">hallelujah for the lover, the leaver, &amp; the lonely alike</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettydizzeed/pseuds/prettydizzeed'>prettydizzeed</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Anger, Character Study, Crisis of Faith, Gen, Heresy, M/M, Non-Chronological, Sacrilege, religious trauma</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 10:27:27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,405</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25885957</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettydizzeed/pseuds/prettydizzeed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Nicolò looks at the sky, and at the man beside him, and shakes the dust off his shoes onto everything he used to believe. </p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>107</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>hallelujah for the lover, the leaver, &amp; the lonely alike</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>title adapted from “Fever Pitch” by Rainbow Kitten Surprise, which has been part of the soundtrack to my faith crisis </p><p>brief emetophobia tw; more details in the end notes</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Nicolò looks at the sky, and at the man beside him, and shakes the dust off his shoes onto everything he used to believe. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And with that, he steps forward to wander in the desert.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>*</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It’s as visceral an absence as an organ, sometimes. Other times, he can step through the shadow of a steeple and not even flinch when he feels nothing. He debates heart versus lungs on the bad days, gasping for breath at even the memory of an altar, forgetting the rhythm of his blood. It’ll always be bone-deep, is the thing, no number of centuries enough to muffle the memory of this hymn, that catechism. When he learns about DNA, before he realizes they’re only using a few letters, he pictures words woven so deep into the core of him as to be inextricable even after hundreds of stab wounds. This is the kind of thing, he knows, that you can bleed for but can never bleed out. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He wonders on more than one occasion if returning for Thomas was an act of revenge rather than grace. He’s so sick of reaching out and being met with only crimson and holes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>*</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He thinks, unbidden, of a different Yusuf, standing so near to here so long ago. Looks to the man beside him, beneath that same sun. </span>
  <em>
    <span>What you intended for evil, Nicolò, the Lord has worked for good. </span>
  </em>
  <span>It reverberates through his ribs with the strength of the Spirit, and he falls to his knees in the sand and is thoroughly overcome by dry, dehydrated sobs. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>*</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Maybe it’s an appendix, he thinks in 1984. A vestigial faith, calling attention to itself only when it explodes and hurts like a motherfucker. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“He acts like class struggle is something you opt into, not a fundamental part of history,” he says to Yusuf, alternating rapidly between grinding his teeth and dropping his jaw. His mouth is a cave, all echo and darkness. “I </span>
  <em>
    <span>guarantee</span>
  </em>
  <span> I’ve seen more history than you,” he says to the paper, loud and vitriolic, and Yusuf’s smile is raw as a split scab.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We sure have.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“How is it even possible to interpret the </span>
  <em>
    <span>Exodus,</span>
  </em>
  <span> of all things, in a way that isn’t political? That was a political act, resisting oppression </span>
  <em>
    <span>is always a political act,</span>
  </em>
  <span> and a whole lot of good it does for someone like him to give lip service to repenting of the sin of colonialism when they don’t take a single action of reparation—” he’s gripping his hair hard, he realizes distantly, and he swallows, staring at the pages. “People can be redeemed and still not be free,” he says quietly, and he knows he does not need to tell Yusuf that he has spent so long as the reverse. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I just—this might’ve been the one good thing that’s come from all of it. And they want to squash it like an ant beneath the steel boot of orthodoxy.” He takes a shallow breath. “He called it a perversion, Yusuf.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“They are very fond of that word, aren’t they?” Yusuf says, but not lightly. His eyes are mournful, and Nicky swallows down a sigh. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be making you deal with all of this.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Who else are you going to talk to about it?” Yusuf asks, and he’s right; even if Andy or Booker was around lately, they’d understand only the anger, not the pain. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Still,” Nicky says, and Yusuf nods. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s not fair,” he agrees. “Each of us deserves someone else to talk to about these things, for different reasons, but neither of us will ever fully have that. So we’ll continue to talk to each other instead. And I knew from the first day we didn’t raise up arms against each other, Nicolò, when you wept tears that wouldn’t fall, that I’d be there for every time your faith tried to claw its way out not caring if it shredded your ribcage in the process.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nicky takes the hand he offers. “It’s worse when it feels like it’s trying to crawl back in,” he admits. “Although this caught me off guard, too—I didn’t think I had any left to lose.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“My heart,” Yusuf says, earnest and apologetic, “you will always have faith.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>*</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nicky rises with Yusuf every morning when he wakes up for Fajr. Usually, he goes for a walk. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He thinks about asking to join him, though, sometimes, a covenant that could resonate all the way to his marrow: your people will be my people and your God will be my God. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Someday, maybe, he thinks. It would feel wrong now, sealing the frayed ends of his grief with the heat of another devotion. He needs to live through this, not redirect it, so he wades into the reeds of his belief in a dozen different countries’ parks and listens for the crying of a child. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It used to be enough, the thought of a God who would dry his tears. Maybe it should still be, but that’s more of a contradiction than even the thorniest doctrine when the only times he cries lately are because of the Church itself.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>*</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been 920 years since my last confession, and the last time I received the Eucharist, it tasted like blood. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>*</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’s supposed to be collecting water, but instead, he’s thrashing at the surface, hitting with all his strength at something he can’t damage—the river; his own reflection. He wonders how much fire it would take to burn away his baptism—but then, the Spirit moved through that, too, so maybe there’s no escaping it. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The earth—if they could bury him, maybe it’d be different. So much would be different. If this eternal life is an act of God, though, he’s not sure it’s from his. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Whatever happened to thou shalt not </span>
  <em>
    <span>murder?</span>
  </em>
  <span>” he screams at the ripples where his face should be. Half a dozen times, he had resurrected and immediately reached for his hip, drawing the sword and dying by it in quick succession, and never once turning his cheek, baring his throat. An entire army of them, for god’s sake—literally, he thinks, and barely makes it to the riverbank before he retches. </span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>If anyone takes what is yours,</span>
  </em>
  <span> he quotes, </span>
  <em>
    <span>do not demand it back.</span>
  </em>
  <span> The Church can have his soul, and their war can have his humanity, and he will ask only for the safety of this stranger and the means to keep living, in flesh if not in spirit. They were wrong about which was the weaker of the two. </span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Give us this day our daily bread. </span>
  </em>
  <span>If it were to fall from the heavens, maybe that would change his mind. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>When he finally looks up, panting, Yusuf is watching him. He holds out a rag he produced from somewhere, and Nicolò takes it with a grateful nod, washes his mouth and face. “Thank you,” he says, gesturing to it, and then to the mess, the water he’s now used half of and will need to collect again, “I’m sorry.”</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you yourself have been a stranger— </span>
  </em>
  <span>But that apology is better saved for when there isn’t a language barrier, when it’s for the right reasons, when he knows if Yusuf would rather hear it or not. For now, he gathers the water, and he returns to the river with both of their clothes to wash, and he keeps an eye on their surroundings as Yusuf prays.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>*</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It’s not like Yusuf has never wrestled. Some mornings, Nicky wakes up and feels his hand on his wrist, pulling him back to bed, and Nicky wraps his arms around him as he weeps or listens as he talks. Yusuf’s relationship to religion, though, while not linear, is cyclic, and after a month or a year or, on one devastating occasion, a decade, he finds his way to something that brings him peace, and Nicky embraces him hard when they get out of bed before the sunrise. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nicolò, though, he can’t even say he’s been in a dark night of the soul for hundreds of thousands of days, because that implies an impending reunion he isn’t expecting and wouldn’t know how to bear.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>*</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nicolò wakes up from death. Puts a hand to the wound in his side.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>My Lord and my God!</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>Unlike the story, though, it heals.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>i’m on tumblr @campgender if you want to chat!!</p><p>to avoid the emetophobia tw, stop reading at “An entire army of them, for god’s sake—literally, he thinks” and pick back up at the next paragraph </p><p>A breakdown of the biblical and theological references for anyone who’s interested:<br/>1) Nicolò shaking the dust off his shoes is a reference to Jesus’s instructions to the disciples about their ministry; him metaphorically doing it onto his former beliefs is essentially a condemnation of the Church. “If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet. Truly I tell you, it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.” Matthew 10:14-15 (NIV)<br/>2) Thomas was a disciple who said he wouldn’t believe in Jesus’s resurrection unless he saw and touched the wounds in Jesus’s hands and side himself; Jesus appeared to him and let him do so<br/>3) Yusuf (Joseph) appears in both the Qur'an and the Torah (and therefore also the Old Testament), in Yusuf and Genesis, respectively. Yusuf’s brothers are jealous that he’s their father’s favorite and sell him into slavery; he eventually reaches a position of power in Egypt, where he saves people from famine, including his brothers, and tells them, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives” (Genesis 50:20, NIV).<br/>4) In 1984, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would later become Pope Benedict XVI, published “Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation.’” The term liberation theology was coined by Gustavo Gutiérrez in 1971 and describes a movement, largely in Latin America, to use Christianity as a foundation for social change and liberation of the poor. The leadership of the Catholic church was really opposed to it (and to a certain extent still is).<br/>5) The story of Ruth &amp; Naomi is incredibly powerful: “But Ruth replied, ‘Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.’” (Ruth 1:16-17, NIV)<br/>6) Moses was hidden in the reeds as an infant to save him from being a victim of the genocide of Jewish boys. (Exodus 2)<br/>7) Transubstantiation is the Catholic doctrine that states that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are transformed into the body and blood of Jesus, while their appearances stay the same.<br/>8) Thou shalt not murder is one of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20); technically, the King James Bible wouldn’t exist for another 512 years, but I went with name recognition over historical accuracy.<br/>9) Jesus said “all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52, NIV) and “If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also” (Luke 6:29, NIV) and “If anyone takes what is yours do not demand it back” (Luke 6:30, NIV)<br/>10) “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” is from Matthew 26:41 (NIV)<br/>11) “Give us this day our daily bread” is from the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus’s example of how to pray (Matthew 6:9-13). God provided bread (manna) from heaven to prevent the Jewish people from starving in the desert (Exodus 16)<br/>12) The full verse is “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:21, NASB). It’s taken horrifically out of context in Nicolò’s thoughts here; it’s a reminder to the Jewish people of their own oppression from which God delivered them.<br/>13) The phrase “dark night of the soul” comes from a poem of the same title by St. John of the Cross, in which the speaker goes through a crisis of faith that ultimately culminates in a deep, mystical union with God<br/>14) When Thomas recognizes Jesus, he says, “My Lord and my God!”</p></blockquote><div class="children module" id="children">
  <b class="heading">Works inspired by this one:</b>
  <ul>
    <li>
        <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29586078">[podfic] hallelujah for the lover, the leaver, &amp; the lonely alike</a> by <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/growlery/pseuds/growlery">growlery</a>
    </li>
  </ul>
</div></div></div>
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